y has
developed in the individual countries if, in one generation, it has
acquired a force which defies all the powers opposed to it and can be
sure of victory in the near future--how comes it about? From this,
that the greater industry has created the modern proletariat, a class,
which for the first time in history can set about the abolition not of
this or that particular class organization or of this or that
particular class privilege but of classes in general, and it is in the
position that it must carry out this line of action on the penalty of
sinking to the Chinese coolie level. And that the same greater
industry has on the other hand produced a class which is in possession
of all the tools of production and the means of life but in every
period of prosperity (Schwindelperiode) and in each succeeding panic
shows that it is incapable of controlling in the future the growing
productive forces; a class under whose leadership society runs
headlong to ruin like a locomotive whose closed safety valve the
engine driver is too weak to open. In other words it has come about
that the productive forces of the modern capitalistic mode of
production as well as the system of distribution based upon it are in
glaring contradiction to the mode of production itself and to such a
degree that a revolution in the modes of production and distribution
must take place which will abolish all class differences or the whole
of modern society will fall. It is in these actual material facts,
which are necessarily becoming more and more evident to the exploited
proletariat, that the confidence in the victory of modern socialism
finds its foundation and not in this or that bookworm's notions of
justice and injustice.

_II. The Force Theory._

(Herr Duehring argues that the causes of class subjection are to be
sought in political conditions and that political force is the
primary, and economic conditions merely the secondary, cause of class
distinctions Engels makes the following reply to these arguments):

* * * * *

This is Herr Duehring's theory. It is set out, decreed so to say, here
and in several other places. But we cannot find the slightest attempt
to prove it or to disprove the opposite theory in the three thick
volumes. Moreover if there was an abundance of proof we should get
none from Herr Duehring, for the matter is proven by the famous fall
of man in that Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave